Fly-tipping
Debate between Rupa Huq and Natasha Irons(2 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Dr Huq
The hon. Lady makes an excellent point, and the idea of the community skip, which my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall raised in her speech, sounds like a good one. Why not take the solution to the people, rather than expect it from them? We know that all our local authorities are cash-strapped, so I wonder whether the Minister might propose a trial and give that idea a whirl everywhere, because it is free. I now have two boroughs in my constituency—Hammersmith and Ealing—and bulky items collection is at a charge. When I suggested the community skip, I was told, “But it would fill up with builder’s waste.” Great! Surely that is better than having it on every street corner. When I put to an officer the idea of CCTV, which I had received from people who email in with solutions, he answered:
“In order to carry out the sort of enforcement your constituent is asking for with cameras, we would need an infrastructure and network the likes of which one finds in novels by George Orwell.”
There is literally a “computer says no” attitude that comes back. Let us be a bit more creative.
Natasha Irons (Croydon East) (Lab)
Local councils battling this torrent of fly-tipping tend to deploy CCTV, but it then takes people to watch the CCTV to find the culprits. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should give councils the funding to staff that CCTV surveillance but also make use of the footage, such as by creating an online wall of shame, as we did in my previous council? That might put that footage to good use.
Dr Huq
It sounds like a panacea, but we do not know who these people are, so there are a lot of issues. But yes, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall pointed out, having more funding from central Government would be great after 14 years of cash-strapped councils. If we get rid of the booking system, the possibility of spontaneously mowing the lawn and taking the waste down to wherever would also be opened up.
I think we are running out of time and there are lots of Members present, but I want to praise LAGER Can and Kathy Swift on tirelessly doing community clean-ups. It terms of the necessity of having such groups, it is a bit like food banks: the fact that we have more food banks than branches of McDonald’s in this country is really a sign of state failure. It should not be Kathy who is cleaning up every unofficial dump in a borough of 360,000 people.
This has been a great debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ealing Southall. Let us install some community pride in areas, because well-maintained areas are less likely to become hotspots for dumping. I hope our suggestions do not fall on deaf ears. In a similar way to the Jubilee 2000 debt campaigners, let us make fly-tipping history.